The Case for Using Your Email Platform as a CRM
Have you seen how expensive the leading customer relationship management (CRM) platforms are lately?
HubSpot starts at $90 per month/seat for its Sales Hub Professional plan. They offer two other plans, with far fewer features, that are each $15 per month/seat. However, they are both designed to give you a taste, but not enough horsepower to do what you need in terms of automation tools and sequences.
HighLevel starts at $97 per month. They are big on white labeling their solution, which means that I’ve met lots of marketing folks who sell it at a discount. But even then, it’s still close to $50 per month under the best deal I’ve seen.
And while Salesforce offers a Starter Suite for $25 per user/month, like the dynamic with HubSpot, you don’t really get enough tools to meet your needs in the marketplace until you upgrade to their Pro Suite plan, which is $100 per user/month.
I built my CRM more simplistically — and I save a lot of money doing it
I mentioned above some of the HighLevel resellers I’ve talked to. Most are pretty casual about the product, but some get flummoxed after a harder sell when I tell them that HighLevel — and every all-in-one CRM platform out there — has an incredibly high bar to meet in order for me to become a customer.
That bar is: I can do everything I need for emailing leads and clients, capturing and looking up sales call conversations and action items, and tracking hot and warm leads and where each one is in my sales process for less than $10 per month.
As a Squarespace customer for my website platform and hosting, I get access to Google Workspace for $7.20 per month. This gives me access to Google’s email interface as well as its suite of tools including Google Drive (which includes Google Sheets).
Business Gmail and Google Sheets — so what?
Gmail is ubiquitous and its interface is kind of boring. And Google Sheets is a less intimidating version of Excel. Why do I use those tools under Google Workspace when I could get their functionality, plus a lot more focused on client personalization and automation, with a dedicated CRM solution?
Because I haven’t seen a business need I can’t meet where I would have to go outside of Google Workspace.
For example:
I have several lead generation and nurturing email templates I’ve sent myself that I can copy and paste from for new outbound emails.
I send myself notes from discovery calls and other calls with potential clients and collaborators. While Google's public search function gets all the scrutiny from marketers and business journalists, its private, per-user “Search mail” field has also been improved over time, and it works very well to pull up exactly the email(s) I need on demand.
Also in Gmail, I use the search field in the Sent area to check if I've already emailed contacts that I meet at virtual networking events, so that I don’t accidentally send someone an introductory message twice. This feature is more and more helpful the longer I’m in business (the more contacts I send to).
I use Google Drive to store my client agreement templates, which, being in Google Doc format, are easily editable to customize to leads I’m about to close. It also has a ton of storage space, which comes in handy for video files from (and to) promotional partners, as well as to store client work files, files for lead magnets, slides for live events I host on LinkedIn, and more.
And finally, when it comes to Google Sheets, I love, love, love that I can customize each sheet tab — and entire document with as many tabs as I desire — to my niches and, thus, to my specific business. For example, one of my tabs is labeled “SMF,” which stands for Service-Market Fit (recently I started selling products, but I mainly pitch myself as a service provider for marketing agencies and fractional CMOs). My SMF tab allows me to track all the leads I’ve generated from virtual networking and other marketing channels, when I had my first call with them, where each one is relative to the Close stage, the Close date, number of days to Close per lead, average number of days to Close across all Closed leads, my Close Rate, and more.
Here’s the point
A simple solution can be boring. By definition, it is short on nuance and options.
However, simplicity still has a place in business solutions today. My advice is to ignore the slick, omnichannel advertising of the major CRM platforms, and even to cast doubt on the day-to-day usability of all the features you see promoted on CRM solution pricing and plan comparison web pages.
If you’re a solopreneur and/or a first-time business owner, I recommend that you start under the Microsoft (Outlook + Excel) or Google (business Gmail + Drive/Sheets) ecosystem, and push its content development and sales tools as far as you can before considering the leap to a standalone CRM solution. In addition to saving money, this lean tech stack approach focuses your precious time on what matters most — client or customer acquisition and service — and reduces your risk of losing some of that time to assessing and using CRM features that, at the end of the day, may not move your business forward.
